Commentary

Our democratic election process has always been the envy of any country that aspired to be on par with United States. I remember staying up late on election night to find out who the winners were of that day’s contests.

Today is March 25, three weeks after Election Day in California, and we will not know for certain who the winners will be until April 12, when the election is certified by the Secretary of State. We are told the delay is due to the voters’ signatures being verified, their registration status verified, and verifying that the voter did not vote elsewhere.

However, the aforementioned checks after the fact could have been done in person at the voter’s own precinct, saving weeks of processing time and personnel expense to conduct such. Before the advent of machines, the results were known on election night. Now, in contentious races, the seemingly unpopular candidate or initiative wins several weeks after Election Day, when more votes are found and counted.

As of March 25, California has tens of thousands of ballots yet to be processed, which means that a machine cannot read them. These ballots are predominantly Vote by Mail ballots, and many ballots must be “remade” manually by someone, for example if they were damaged in the mail. Does the voter know that someone other than the voter themself is remaking their ballot with the same intent?

In California, there were 22,077,333 registered voters as of Feb. 20, and 22,314,258 Vote by Mail ballots were mailed out—this is potentially 236,925 more ballots than registered voters. It is anyone’s guess where any extra ballots were mailed to and what exactly happened to them.

We have been told of machine malfunctions, paper size errors, tabulating errors, or human reporting errors being the reason that vote totals are inaccurate. However, suspicious results have caused voter confidence to be lost, as the low voter participation numbers have reflected. As of March 24, only 6,942,364 voters returned their Vote by Mail ballot for an overall participation rate of 31 percent. A dismal showing for a state the size of California.

We have lost all faith that we actually choose our representatives instead of having them selected for us. It is time we return to the days of voting on paper ballots that were hand-counted in our own precinct and on Election Day to ensure the integrity of our elections and restore the public’s faith in our representative government.